


Grind Me Down

by goingbadly



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Reichenbach, Reichenbach Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:50:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingbadly/pseuds/goingbadly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I can see the end coming, although I can't see what form it will take. I should want to fight it. I should care that he's going insane, I should care that he's killing us both. But nights like this, I can't even manage the resistance of hating him.</p><p>[Immediately pre-fall.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grind Me Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gimmemormor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gimmemormor/gifts).



> This was supposed to be PWP, and then it was not, and I'm sorry. Um - if anyone out there actually follows/subscribes to me and has read my porn before - is there anything you want me to try my hand at? Everything I come up with turns to pain.
> 
> Case in point being this.

There are nights when it's dark and it's bloody and I should care that he's losing it, but I can't.

It's October 16th, 2011. Jim is waiting with his leg crossed, ankle on knee, his back to the door of this crappy apartment I'm renting. He's smoking and staring out the window. I’m coming back from the job we're in town for, favoring my leg and cursing a dead man who'd been just a little too quick at the draw. Thin tendrils of ghostly white twist up from Jim's cherry, lit like the Northern Lights by the neon city outside. He doesn't turn around, and if I wanted him dead he'd be six kinds of blown out the window by now. He didn't even lock the door.

I hate him a little for that.

I'm not sure if his seat was originally intended to be a futon or a couch, it's so beat to shit. There's ugly burns in it like stars where he's put his cigarettes out and it smells like rotting meat and nicotine and ash. The whole place reeks. There'd be flies, if it was warm enough for flies in here.

"Job's done?" he drawls, and takes a drag.

I nod, even though he can't see me. "Yeah."

"Good." Back to staring out the window, face reflected in the glass. It's cloudy but not raining, and the sky is underlit a thick polluted yellow. This might be all the interaction I get out of Jim tonight. I can't tell anymore. He might want something to eat, and he might want to fuck, and he might want to put me in the hospital. Or he might just stare out the window and smoke and say nothing.

He's thinking of Holmes, and I know it.

I drop my duffel by the door, my rifle and knife and the cell-phone that never gets texts anymore. The noise seems to startle him. As I kick off my shoes he looks half-way round, so he's crisp in silhouette to the window with his hair flying off in infinite and improbable directions.

"Are you hurt?" he says suddenly, and I double-take. The clean silhouette contorts as he scowls. Can't help my surprise, though. The last time I got seriously hurt on a job it was in Rio, and all I got was a text timed with my release from surgery - < _Told all the good boys down south I'd pay ten mil for a heart as long as it's DNA matched to you. Always said I'd have it. Maybe mounted._ -JM >

I know there's something broken in me when the thought of him caring enough to put a ten million dollar bounty on my head makes my chest ache.

"Just my leg," I tell him gruffly. I've done it a thousand times before - limped home and stitched myself up at the kitchen table, with him drinking PG-fucking-tips across the counter even though he could afford tea flown from China every morning. White fingers wrapped tight around the mug I bought him in India - _No! More! Emperors!_ on one side, _Down With The British!_ on the other, and he would laugh himself sick every time I wrapped presents in the bloody shirts of my targets to bring home safe.

"Let me see." Jim butts another cigarette out on the poor couch and the smell of cheap burning plastic fills the air. He kicks over a half-empty shot glass as he stands and clambers over the back, like a kid, with sneakers to match.  Some viscous substance spills out behind him, staining the carpet – although this particular carpet isn’t really getting any dirtier than it already is.

Jim comes for me slow, backlit so I can't see his face. I lean against the wall to take weight off my injured leg and watch him. Once upon a time that shadow would have scared me, featureless and absolute, Moriarty the King cloaked in his darkness. Then a year or two ago, the darkness would have seemed a warm and comforting thing; Jim, my Jamie, who might try to have me killed on a joke but would never _seriously_ consider letting me out of his clutches.

Now the man who stops in front of me is a stranger, unrecognizable with his fever-bright eyes bruised into shadow and his chapped lips and the insanity that’s naked and painful on his face. I don't trust him but there's this dull hollowness in me when I try to care if he hurts me. When he reaches for my leg I don't bother to flinch. I'm too tired.

If there's any sort of thrill when he bends his head to my thigh, on his knees in front of me, it's just a reflection - like the light in his hair, only ripples, already past me in instants too small to get a grip on.

"You'll need stitches," Jim says. He would know. "I'll do them."

Another surprise but I'm numb and tired, so when he puts me on the couch and slides a vodka in my hand I let him strip me without fighting or trying to get a leg over him. His insanity’s ground all the urges out of me, filed me down until I just sort of _exist_ , without struggling.

I bring the vodka to my lips. Swallow. The ceiling is stained, dark brown circles like constellations. Jim used to name those, on jobs. Should have paid attention. The point of the needle presses in to the meat of my thigh.

“Darling,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry.” He never apologizes, especially not for _hurting_ me. It takes me a moment, but I drink and stare at the ceiling and endure and eventually I think, maybe it’s not hurting me that he’s apologizing for. Maybe as I bite my tongue and take it inch-by-inch, something in him has surfaced enough to realize that he’s killing us both. Maybe he knows how tired I am, how deep in me the hate and apathy has coiled, how I’m starting to picture his head with a bullet through it just because I can’t go on like this.

Maybe.

But I’ve loved Jim Moriarty long enough that I don’t even start to hope.


End file.
